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Documentary chases fragile trail of pass system that once controlled movement of First Nations

Alex Williams, the director of the documentary film The Pass System, is still searching for evidence of the apartheid-like government policy.

“I find it absolutely astonishing that that could possibly be true,” said Doug Cass, director of library and archives at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, of how the federal government had to rely on outside sources to study its own policy. (Chris Bolin / for the Toronto Star)

Filmmaker Alex Williams could find only two passes which First Nations in the prairies were required to obtain from the local Indian Agent in order to leave their reserves, in the national collection at Library and Archives Canada. This sample pass was one of them, attached to a letter dated March 27, 1934. (Library and Archives Canada)

In 1941, the federal government asked all Indian agents to return passbooks to Ottawa to be destroyed. Here is one passbook featured in The Pass System, directed by Alex Williams. (Alex Williams / Saskatchewan Archives Board)

OTTAWA—Documentary filmmaker Alex Williams spent years searching through archives to find evidence of the pass system, a Canadian apartheid-like government policy that forbade First Nations in the prairies from leaving their reserves without permission.

The Pass SystemThe Pass System, the film he directed on the dark chapter of Canadian history, features many examples of the passes signed during the time the policy, which documents show the federal government secretly knew was illegal to impose.

Only two of the passes, which were standardized and printed centrally, were found at Library and Archives Canada, and Williams is continuing his quest to find out what the federal government did to all that evidence — and why.

“Unless we know all the facts, or as many as we can get our hands on, we won’t be able to move forward with the truth part of truth and reconciliation,” said Williams, who is now exploring whether the government continued to impose restrictions on First Nations mobility in Western Canada after officially putting an end to the pass system in 1941.

There is one major clue pointing to what happened.

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Harold McGill, who was director of the Indian Affairs branch at the department of mines and resources, circulated a letter dated July 11, 1941 to local Indian agents, ending the pass system and ordering them to return all passes to Ottawa to be destroyed.

It could have ended there, but for the fact that Don Light, 83, and his late brother Doug, decided not to do exactly what had been asked of them one day in the early 1950s.

Their uncle owned the local post office in Battleford, Sask., which had the Indian Affairs agency office on the second floor — and boxes upon boxes of their old records in the basement.

Light said his brother was asked by someone at the government office to clear out the basement, and the pair loaded them into his pick-up truck.

His brother, however, was an aboriginal history buff and so he decided to keep some of it, eventually donating many of the boxes – which contained passbooks from 1917-18 – to the Glenbow Museum in 1960.

Those passes and three others in the possession of the museum were cited in a 1974 study the department of Indian Affairs did on the little-discussed policy, which by that point had been so forgotten that the whole point of the research was to determine whether the pass system had even existed.

The report, done out of the Treaties and Historical Research Centre, did not refer to any passes or stubs within its own archives, which Williams points to as a sign of how thoroughly their own record had been erased.

“I find it absolutely astonishing that that could possibly be true,” said Doug Cass, director of library and archives at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, of how the federal government had to rely on outside sources to study its own policy.

John Leslie, who was a manager at the Treaties and Historical Research Centre from 1976 until he retired in 2001, offered some more clues into what could have happened to all the documents.

Many of the records kept by local Indian Agency offices were stored in barns and other outbuildings, said Leslie, which Ottawa became concerned about in the late 1950s and early 1960s when it began getting more serious about records retention.

He said he remembers one official in Ottawa telling him about touring Indian agency offices in southern Alberta to inspect the state of things: “He said it was terrible. They would have records in henhouses, barns . . . Birds would be in there, mice and rats, and there would be poop all over the place,” adding they would bulldoze everything and set it on fire.

Leslie provided the Star with more than 300 pages worth of Indian Affairs documents on the destruction of records between 1960 and 1969 — the result of an access-to-information request — which refers to how poorly some of these records were kept, particularly in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, referring to “laxity” such as damp basements, mice, vandalism and deliberate incineration of records that were not deemed important enough for posterity.

Another factor could have been the emergency paper drives during the Second World War, with Indian Affairs contributing a total of 5 tons.

Leslie also said there was a flood in the basement of the old Indian Affairs building sometime in the 1960s, and he would repeatedly see the results of years later when assisting people researching land claims.

“The files arrived board-like, because everything was congealed, so we would help them set up a kettle and try to steam the documents,” said Leslie.

“People think, ‘Hmmm, government conspiracy.’ No, it’s just government ineptitude,” he said.

Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development, as the department is now named, was unable to respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Williams thinks any one of those things could explain the absence of documents, but the reason for the directive in the 1941 letter to return unused passbooks to Ottawa for destruction remains a mystery.

The Pass System will be broadcast Apr. 13 and 14 on APTN.

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